Rock's vegan fundamentalist: why Morrissey was ahead of his time - The Telegraph

Rock's vegan fundamentalist: why Morrissey was ahead of his time.
The Telegraph - by Adam White, 10th Jan., 2019.

The following article is behind a registration wall.
So, as opposed to an excerpt, the whole thing is reproduced for your convenience:

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"In 1985, a year after releasing the album Meat Is Murder as part of The Smiths, Morrissey was performing at a gig in Stoke on Trent when he was pelted with objects from the audience: it was a string of sausages, each one carefully inscribed with the title of his album.

“They hit me in the face and part of them got in my mouth,” he later recalled. “I had to just run off the stage and heave! I really vomited. Eating meat is the most disgusting thing I can think of. It’s like biting into your grandmother.” This was the last time animal flesh has even come close to Morrissey's mouth.

Back then, Morrissey was fighting on behalf of a mainstream vegetarian ideology very much in its infancy, and inciting much controversy in the process. With veggie food almost exclusively found in hippie cafes and the idea of vegetarian sausages in your local Tesco barely a glimmer of an idea on Linda McCartney’s vision board, Morrissey and The Smiths were notable for being very public early proponents of a meat-free diet.

Fast forward 30 years, and Morrissey has become a maddening pop culture troll, lecturing the world on the evils of eating meat while expressing a number of inflammatory socio-political stances that have inadvertently encouraged most of us, whatever our political beliefs, to swear we'll never listen to his music again. But even as his politics have changed, his commit to the vegetarian - now vegan - cause has never wavered.

With veganism already declared to be the hottest cultural trend of 2019, assisted by the social media fervor surrounding the Gregg’s Vegan Sausage Roll and news that Beyoncé and Jay-Z have authored the forward to a vegan guide that essentially reads like a cult manifesto, perhaps it's time to give Morrisey some credit: he was ahead of the curve all along.

And that’s despite there having always been a thread of unhelpful lunacy to Morrissey’s animals-first mantra, with nary a Morrissey profile going by without a brief dip into all kinds of manic hysteria. From admonishing anyone who doesn’t feel the same level of horror over the terrorism of Anders Breivik as they do at the burger dispensaries at your average branch of KFC, to his declaration that there is “no difference” between the eating of animals and literal paedophilia (“They are both rape, violence, murder,” he said in 2014), Morrissey has often come to resemble a cartoon pastiche of a militant vegan.

Such hyperbolic, giggle-inducing metaphors for meat-eating have been a permanent fixture in Morrissey's press since the beginning of his career, while his public support for the kind of vegan activist most often seen dunking cans of paint over supermodels has spawned a legion of unflattering stereotypes. But buried beneath the histrionics have often been slivers of truth, now served up in more palatable and less casually racist forms by today’s A-list.

Morrissey’s sheer conviction in his beliefs, coupled with his unmistakable power within industry circles, has had an enormous effect. Although he failed in his campaign to get General Motors to switch all their car seats to vegan leather, he has repeatedly threatened to pull out of festivals and concerts if meat is sold on the premises (shows in Iceland were cancelled when the venues wouldn't bend to his will). He successfully convinced LA’s Staples Center to shut down its McDonalds ahead of one of his concerts in 2013, along with any food outlet selling meat on the floor level of the venue - Paul McCartney was flatly refused when he made the same request.

He has even claimed that the organisers of Coachella offered to become an entirely meat-free event for a year if he was able to get The Smiths back together.

His riders are known to state that his hotel rooms on tour cannot be situated downwind of any nearby barbecues, while he insists all of his bandmates and roadies must follow a vegan or vegetarian diet while touring. (Though fans have debated how successful he has been in that regard, gossiping about band members pining for roast dinners and devouring Haribos backstage.)

Attendees aren’t so lucky either. In 2011 it was reported that Morrissey fans were being frisked for meat products at his gigs, their bags searched for anything resembling parts of an animal, potentially to curb any incidents like the infamous 1985 sausage attack. And although the rumour th
(This incomplete sentence is actually in the article - FWD).

A vegetarian since the age of 11 and a vegan since the turn of the decade, Morrissey first began speaking openly about his beliefs via Meat Is Murder, a track he and The Smiths would play against a projected slideshow of slaughterhouses, animal testing labs and factory farming. In the process, he exposed a generation of music fans to the ghoulish realities of animal products. Such provocative staging remains intact during Morrissey gigs today, a reminder that while much of his overall worldview has changed in the years since, his deliberately antagonistic approach to animal rights hasn’t.

The album said track stems from, also titled Meat Is Murder, is still the toughest of the four Smiths records to revisit, full of evocative anger and political imagery, but lacking in hooks or many true, four-carat Smiths classics (How Soon Is Now? was only added to the US release of the album). And its failings are neatly encapsulated in the title track itself – a droning bit of melodrama that sounds particularly off-key in the wake of songs revolving around child abuse, poverty and class warfare. When Morrissey sings that eating meat is “death for no reason, and death for no reason is murder,” it’s difficult not to pick holes in his logic.

But while the track is no typical fan favourite, it did have an effect on a significant proportion of Smiths fans at the time. Speaking to journalist Neil Taylor in 2010 (via NME), guitarist Johnny Marr, today a vegan himself, called the song one of the things he is most proud of. “20 years on people tell me they became a vegetarian as a result of Meat Is Murder, and I think that is quite literally rock music changing someone’s life,” he said. “It’s certainly changing the life of animals.”

Like much of the rest of Morrissey’s public image throughout the Eighties and Nineties, his vegetarianism would become material for jokes made at his expense, presented as just another mockable characteristic of a man who was proudly soft, emotionally vulnerable and ambiguous in his sexuality – all qualities that made him a beloved figure for a generation of sad Eighties teens, as well as an easy target for the baffled old guard. It's easy to roll your eyes at his endless pontificating, but this was a man waving the flag for animal rights at a time when it decidedly wasn’t cool to do so.,

“Morrissey helped put PETA on the map,” PETA’s vice president of campaigns Dan Mathews told Spin Magazine in 2004. “Meat Is Murder was a benchmark in defining animal rights as an edgy youth movement and has created legions of vegetarians.”

An interesting aspect to Morrissey’s vegetarianism, however, has been how often it has shifted in its specifics. His unusual equating of various forms of human tragedy with the slaughter of animals has resulted in an alienating coldness at times, be it his shrug of a response to Band Aid, or his empathy with the violent tactics of the Animal Rights Militia.

And considering his devotion to the vegan cause, Morrissey’s revelatory interview earlier this year with author Fiona Dodwell came as a surprise. “I’ve always found food to be very difficult because I only eat bread, potatoes, pasta and nuts… all stodge,” he said. “I can’t eat anything that has any flavour. I’ve never had a curry, or coffee, or garlic.” In contrast with Marr, who discussed with Vegan Magazine in 2011 a diet rich in tofu, pastas, stuffed vine leaves and vegan cookies, it was curiously uninformed for such a public proponent of non-meat diets.

But Morrissey's awareness of the way wealth and class intersect with the availability and affordability of good quality vegan produce, as indicated during a rare TV sit-down with Larry King in 2015, showcased a more knowledgeable appreciation of veganism’s failings – even if it did make him an enemy in the eyes of some of the more hardcore figures of the vegan blogosphere.

In 2015, abolitionist vegan Gary L Francione slammed Morrissey’s comments on the difficulties of transitioning from vegetarianism to veganism. “There is no morally coherent distinction between meat and any other animal product,” Francione wrote. “It’s bad enough that high-visibility people like Morrissey and Paul McCartney pose as ‘animal people’ when they are not vegan.”

It has become as tricky to get a handle on Morrissey’s veganism as it is his politics, both dominated as they are with extremist, almost deliberately outrage-producing stances – something he has done in the press, to varying levels of legacy-ruining, since the peak of his Eighties fame. But despite how easy it has been to roll our collective eyes at his endless pontificating, this was a man waving the flag for animal rights at a time when it decidedly wasn’t cool to do so.

Animal rights awareness in the 1990s largely consisted of supermodels stripping down in adverts for PETA; more often than not, they were wearing fur on the runway a second later). At least Morrissey's hardcore veggie activism was genuinely productive.

It is a shame, then, that he has become such a droning oddball of late. On the list of outrageous comments Morrissey has made in the past decade, from slamming many of the men and women who have come forward with #MeToo stories to publicly supporting a political figure deemed part of a contingent of “Nazis and racists” within UKIP by none other than Nigel Farage, his hyperbolic statements on meat and paedophilia hardly register in the truly dangerous stakes. But it does do an unfortunate disservice to the good he has done in the past."


(Some of the hyperlinks above take you to more gated articles).

A Solo link is cited too: 'Fans have debated...'
Regards,
FWD.
 
ket everything is edited these days to suit the narrative,as with this interview they will applaud him for his stance but also have a slight dig now and again.

I agree, edited to suit their narrative, their agenda.

Also it’s not an interview.
 
'expressing a number of inflammatory socio-political stances that have inadvertently encouraged most of us, whatever our political beliefs, to swear we'll never listen to his music again.'

Translation = 'expressing a number of views that are absolutely everyday views among the working class of Britain and of Europe, but that frighten the f*** out of the establishment, because we are all told that no one is allowed to have such views, confirming his status as music's true insurrectionary.'
 
I wouldn’t touch a Greggs if it was given away free. Anything involving Quorn has to be viewed with suspicion. It’s not real food and has been linked to abdominal complaints. Why couldn’t they just do a soya or seitan version. Quorn is the work of the devil. Lab created junk..
Pilgrimupnorth
a man lived on greggs stuff for two months and lost two stone.your the one for me skinny.
 
I don't know if he was ahead of his times.
The whole anarcho-punk scene was already vegetarian when The Smiths didn't even exist.
I.e, "Sick Butchers" by Flux of Pink Indians was recorded in 1982. "Meat means murder" by Conflict was recorded in 1983... Many other examples.
So it was already something that many second wave punk bands were supporting (similar examples with many of the early American hardcore bands).

Maybe the difference is that The Smiths and then Morrissey as a solo singer became by far more famous than all these early anarcho-punk & hardcore bands together.

Other than that... It's somehow a cliché to say that Morrissey is the "last true punk", which makes sense... A big part of the ideology that he promoted all over these decades gets very close to anarcho-punk.

Disclaimer: these comments don't mean that he was and still is a damn genius!
 
The person that writes the story is usually not the person that writes the headline. This is clickbait journalism where some poor hack put a bunch of previously published stories in a blender and got this. Then it was submitted to someone who probably didn't even read it, because why would you really, and they decided that the vegan angle was the way to go. Piers Morgan is in the news right now for bashing vegan food so it was a perfect time to drag Morrissey through the mud again.
iGqml.gif
 
Morrissey is ahead of his time in many subjects.
yes, strange how the author neglects the only interesting question this article raises. the only conclusion any reader with at least a drop of imagination in his or her brain can draw is that morrissey has always been ahead of his time. with regard to veganism mankind took a step forward, for once.
 
That's all fine but what about the really pressing matter like will Citeh defend a title for once and make sure it's not only United and Chelsea that have done it and most of all will you be able to beat the scousers to it and win the title again?
You are absolutely correct. This IS the pressing matter. Everything else is just distractions. These are nervous times, indeed. A part of me still thinks that LFC will bottle it sooner or later (they’re LFC, for God’s sake), and when they do, we will be ready to retain OUR title.
 
You are absolutely correct. This IS the pressing matter. Everything else is just distractions. These are nervous times, indeed. A part of me still thinks that LFC will bottle it sooner or later (they’re LFC, for God’s sake), and when they do, we will be ready to retain OUR title.

:rolleyes:

:crazy:c
 
:rolleyes:


He doesn’t approve of ANY ‘groups of people’ (regardless if they’re Chinese, Muslim, whatever) that practice such barbaric acts to animals,. You forgot to mention Canadians or any of the countries that hold festivals that he won’t be a part of (most of the time) if they’re serving animal flesh.

It’s not the people who don’t, it’s the people that do, that he doesn’t approve of, it doesn’t matter who they are.
Oh but please tell him the rituals of Isrealites.
 
I don't know if he was ahead of his times.
The whole anarcho-punk scene was already vegetarian when The Smiths didn't even exist.
I.e, "Sick Butchers" by Flux of Pink Indians was recorded in 1982. "Meat means murder" by Conflict was recorded in 1983... Many other examples.
So it was already something that many second wave punk bands were supporting (similar examples with many of the early American hardcore bands).

Maybe the difference is that The Smiths and then Morrissey as a solo singer became by far more famous than all these early anarcho-punk & hardcore bands together.

Other than that... It's somehow a cliché to say that Morrissey is the "last true punk", which makes sense... A big part of the ideology that he promoted all over these decades gets very close to anarcho-punk.

Disclaimer: these comments don't mean that he was and still is a damn genius!

Sure. The important matter is that Morrissey was/is ahead of his time in other topics besides "meat is murder". That's why this article seems like an attempt at damage control. They want to avoid people acknowledge his whole ideology. They are circumscribing his "appropriate" thoughts to animal rights and at the same time they are dismissing the other topics he has referred to as crazy, inadequate and unpopular, when in fact his opinions always had a wider scoop and as someone has said previously here they are widely shared by a huge part of European working class.
It's very obvious Morrissey is being censored by his opinions, and he doesn't feel free to say what he thinks (Free Morrissey). It doesn't care if he is right or not because no one owns the truth. The thing is that he can't express what he thinks because he is immediately condemned by the media when his opinions don't fit in their agenda.
There you have another musicians playing the outcasts but living as bourgeois, juggling as clowns during interviews trying to hide their true opinions for the sake of not saying something politically incorrect and thus damage their career, because they need the media or at least they think they need it. Brave new world.
 
He’s gone from being ahead of the times to now being behind the times. Especially now a days when it comes to interviews where before a country’s local magazine interview wouldn’t see the light of day in other places is now out in open in today’s digital age where he could get away with the stupid outlandish and repugnant things hes says where it would get looked over which isn’t the case in today’s era.
 
:rolleyes:


He doesn’t approve of ANY ‘groups of people’ (regardless if they’re Chinese, Muslim, whatever) that practice such barbaric acts to animals,. You forgot to mention Canadians or any of the countries that hold festivals that he won’t be a part of (most of the time) if they’re serving animal flesh.

It’s not the people who don’t, it’s the people that do, that he doesn’t approve of, it doesn’t matter who they are.

Yes he calls all those people barbaric and monsters or whatever and you know why because they’re the type of people that don’t line up his wallet to buy his shit or see him play. Every race of people on every continent eats meat, people in England and people in the states or in France or in Germany or how about the Japanese with they’re whale hunting very conveniently he’s not calling them those names and you know why because he has people there who buy his shit and pay to see him when he decides to visit to tour. Notice he doesn’t bash the countries he makes his money in, I can’t call these people this or that because they line my wallets. If he really had principles about the whole meat and treatment of animals he wouldn’t be playing anywhere at all because one form of another every country and nation devour and eat animals and are most likely mistreated in some way. Don’t tell me your about the cause when you pick and choose where you wanna play or countries or people you wanna call out because if your really about it you wouldn’t be playing anywhere. Also your fans aren’t paying to see you play live to talk about the cause they’re paying to see you sing.
 
Yes he calls all those people barbaric and monsters or whatever and you know why because they’re the type of people that don’t line up his wallet to buy his shit or see him play. Every race of people on every continent eats meat, people in England and people in the states or in France or in Germany or how about the Japanese with they’re whale hunting very conveniently he’s not calling them those names and you know why because he has people there who buy his shit and pay to see him when he decides to visit to tour. Notice he doesn’t bash the countries he makes his money in, I can’t call these people this or that because they line my wallets. If he really had principles about the whole meat and treatment of animals he wouldn’t be playing anywhere at all because one form of another every country and nation devour and eat animals and are most likely mistreated in some way. Don’t tell me your about the cause when you pick and choose where you wanna play or countries or people you wanna call out because if your really about it you wouldn’t be playing anywhere. Also your fans aren’t paying to see you play live to talk about the cause they’re paying to see you sing.

:crazy:

"dont tell me the cause"??????????????????????????????:crazy:

NOBODY IS TELLING YOU ANYTHING FFS!!

WTF are you HEARING VOICE AGAIN??o_O


 
You are absolutely correct. This IS the pressing matter. Everything else is just distractions. These are nervous times, indeed. A part of me still thinks that LFC will bottle it sooner or later (they’re LFC, for God’s sake), and when they do, we will be ready to retain OUR title.
I am sure the majority of people on this planet prefer Citeh ahead of the scousers but I just have to break it to you, the scousers will lift your trophy this season meaning you've yet again failed to defend it.
 

:crazy:
voices tell you GAY STUFF????
same voice who told you about 'causes'o_O does the voice come in the form or RuPaul?

what type of meds have you been taking?

:pill::pill::handpointleft:
 

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